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Travel Satisfaction and Well-Being

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Quality of Life and Daily Travel

Part of the book series: Applying Quality of Life Research ((BEPR))

Abstract

One approach to assessing the quality of life associated with a person’s daily travel is to obtain a summary judgment of that individual’s satisfaction with travel. Such a judgment could be considered a measure of the transportation-domain-specific subjective well-being (SWB). A number of such summary measures have been developed, including happiness, liking, pleasantness, a subjective valuation of the time spent traveling, and two different Satisfaction with Travel Scales (STS). In this chapter, we discuss some of the conceptual differences among these various measures, and review some key empirical results associated with them. In particular, we conceive of travel satisfaction as being directly influenced by five components of travel, as well as by socio-economic/demographic (SED) traits, attitudes, and trip-/travel-related characteristics. The chapter includes an analysis of data drawn from the well-being module of the 2013 American Time Use Survey (ATUS), to offer preliminary insights into how people feel about their travel episodes, differences in travel-related emotions across socio-economic groups, and how travel compares with other activities in terms of engendering feelings of well-being. We follow with a discussion of the relationship of travel satisfaction to overall well-being, and conclude with some brief reflections on the role of this research domain in our rapidly changing transportation milieu.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This admittedly arbitrary choice for narrowing the scope is motivated by the positive orientation of the very concept of well-being (although of course one’s well-being can also be adverse, just as a “satisfaction” scale can register a dissatisfied traveler), and by the desire to offer a partial counterweight to the still-prevalent tendency, especially in engineering and economic fields, to view travel as entirely a disutility to be minimized.

  2. 2.

    Similar data were analyzed by Morris and Guerra (2015), but (1) our analysis uses the 2013 sample whereas theirs uses the 2010 sample, and (2) our analysis focuses on presenting descriptive statistics, segmented by particular variables of interest, while theirs focuses on modeling the summary variable of affect balance.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Venu Garikapati of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory for his assistance in compiling tabulations of emotional measures using data from the 2013 well-being module of the American Time Use Survey Data. The authors also gratefully acknowledge partial support provided by the Center for Teaching Old Models New Tricks (TOMNET), a University Transportation Center sponsored by the US Department of Transportation through Grant No. 69A3551747116.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Patricia L. Mokhtarian

  2. Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Ram M. Pendyala

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  1. Patricia L. Mokhtarian
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Correspondence to Patricia L. Mokhtarian .

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  1. CTF Service Research Center, Department of Social and Psychological Studies, Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden

    Margareta Friman  & Lars E. Olsson  & 

  2. Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Dick Ettema

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Mokhtarian, P.L., Pendyala, R.M. (2018). Travel Satisfaction and Well-Being. In: Friman, M., Ettema, D., Olsson, L.E. (eds) Quality of Life and Daily Travel. Applying Quality of Life Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76623-2_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76623-2_2

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